Hi,

I have a Vigor 2850vn connected by ethernet 100feet or more from various AP800 access points.
The router is happy being outside of the AP range, as it provides access for family use, as distinct from the AP's which are used to link to laptops etc

However, what I have NOT done correctly is to ensure that if a user moves between AP800's that he has a seemless transition. At the moment it seems to be a case of 'dropped connection' and then log on to the nearest AP.

So....
Is there some simple guides so I can get things sorted?
Maybe even from my initial description here you can recognise something I may be doing wrong!



Thanks

Does the 2850 offer seamless client roaming support? The reason I ask is that WiFi does not generally support seamless roaming from one AP to another, and a drop followed by a reconnect when moving from the range of one AP to another is expected behaviour in most cases. In other words it doesn't work like a cellular network does.

There are some good articles on this but it would be inappropriate for me to link to them from here.

Some manufacturers have added a feature that does apparently allow seamless roaming between WiFi APs though. It is relatively rare, but it exists. I wasn't aware that the 2850/AP800 offered this feature, and can't see anything obvious from a quick glance of the specs, but I have neither device so I can't really speak from experience.

Maybe someone else could chime in on this?

If the SSID and authentication are identical then moving between AP's would be automatic (no user interaction generally required) but the speed depends on WLAN drivers on the client and what roaming behaviour they've got selecting (wording on parameter names vary between the different WLAN vendors). It wouldn't be seamless roaming, without a dropped ping for example and the speed of the switch seems to depend on the WLAN client (some are much faster than others)

If the auth used is 802.1x then it'll use fast hand off and the roam is much more speedy. That needs a radius server, but if one is available I think it's much better than PSK for security and key caching and pre-auth give roaming benefits.

My recommendation would be to set the SSID to be the same as seeing a noticeable disconnect and drop generally happens if the SSIDs are different, as the client will tend to keep with the current SSID if it can. There can be an advantage of different SSIDs as it gives the user greater control over which AP to use. It's often something people recommend with running 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz networks, but personally my preference is to put it all on the same SSID for a better transition when moving around. I suspect that buggy / old client WLAN drivers might be why the 2.4 / 5Ghz different SSID setup is something that people sometimes prefer.